Bitter Party 😝
The chemical that exists to discourage you from eating or drinking things you shouldn’t eat or drink. Like Nintendo Switch cartridges.
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Let’s face it: If an object is small, someone is going to try to see if they can eat it. And generally, the person that tries is most likely going to be a kid who doesn’t know any better.
Case in point: Nintendo Switch cartridges are tiny, so kids are likely going to try eating them. Bad idea. Fortunately, there’s a chemical for that.
This chemical, called Bitrex, has been around since the 1950s, and is a common ingredient of household cleaners and pesticides. What does it do? Simply put, it makes things taste so terrible that they become inedible. While not toxic itself, it has the magic ability to make things incredibly bitter. You only need a little bit of it to basically ruin a large supply of otherwise clean water.
It is Guinness-recognized as the bitterest flavor known to man. And as a result, it’s a common tool used for safety reasons, and is often used in home chemicals that can be dangerous in the wrong hands. After all, Windex and laundry detergent are not built for human consumption—but they’re often around plenty of humans, and are quite colorful, making them particularly attractive to young children.
But it didn’t happen proactively, at least in the U.S. In the 1980s, an Oregon woman named Lynn Tylczak learned of Bitrex and its wide uptake by chemical manufacturers in Europe, and started a campaign to encourage its use in the U.S. She had a tougher road ahead. First, she started with letter-writing to the manufacturers, but eventually switched tactics to advocate in the media. Within a year and a half, she was getting commitments from many chemical manufacturers, who seemed more concerned about profit motives than safety.
One of the hardest to convince was the antifreeze industry—notable because of antifreeze’s infamously sweet taste. At one point, the antifreeze industry attempted to spy on her organization in an effort to defeat her efforts, but that only raised the stakes. By the mid-1990s there was even a law in Oregon requiring Bitrex’s use in antifreeze.
Nowadays, Bitrex is so common that companies like Nintendo proactively use it. After all, a great way to ensure you never want to eat something is if you make it taste awful.
» Wanna learn more? Check out our 2016 piece on the history of Bitrex, “No Acquiring This Taste.”